Tame Layman vetoed The Faceless Ones when we did the Randomiser for reasons that remain obscure to me. I had vaguely planned to revisit the question once we got to the end but by that point the animation had been announced so it seemed better to wait.

I had mentally class The Faceless Ones as a "weird early Troughton" which placed it in the same category as The Underwater Menace and The Macra Terror but actually this is a very different beast. It is much closer in feel to the more realistic Avengers-like atmosphere of The War Machines. Much is made of the Gatwick setting - at least in the first episode which we watched live-action and Tame Layman was impressed enough to comment on the location work. While later episodes do seem to spend an awful lot of time with people sitting outside the Chameleon Tours office, it's only in retrospect that that becomes obvious and, at least viewed an episode at a time, the story progresses at a reasonable pace.

I was genuinely amazed and impressed at the shots of an airplane landing inside a spaceship. I mean, I've no idea what this would have looked like with 1960s model-work but the animation looked great and really added to the feel of ambitious scale to the story. Tame Layman really enjoyed the way the story unfolded. Again, in retrospect, there's quite a lot of running around to no great purpose, but there are several clever ideas along the way, particularly in the later episodes, and its nice to have a resolution in which the antagonists are sent away with slapped wrists rather than being destroyed.

I was a bit disappointed in Pauline Collins' Samantha Briggs. As a character being tried out as a potential companion she ultimately seemed rather superfluous to the action. I'd expected her to be more obviously proactive somehow. However the story did effortlessly pass the Bechdel test partly as a result though, in fact, there are no less than three other one-off female characters in the story, which is more than can be said for many 1960s episodes.

I'm a little surprised this story isn't spoken of more often and more highly in Doctor Who circles. Obviously the fact only two episodes exist mitigates against it, but its a lot of fun as well as being an interesting look at the kind of story the early Troughton years were trying to tell, and the show's initial attempts at telling contemporary tales, before it got side-tracked into endless bases under siege.

I was a little disappointed that Mawdryn Undead was the final randomiser instalment. It's hardly one of the classics of Doctor Who - on the other hand it isn't Time and the Rani either.

I don't think I'd actually seen it since broadcast when I didn't like it much put off by a number of factors including the general unlikeability of any character who isn't the Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan or the Brigadier; some of the narrative leaps and assumptions; and discomfort over the physical deformity of Mawdryn and later the infected Nyssa and Tegan.

Rewatching it, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in Mawdryn Undead. It lacks a central villain: the Black Guardian is mostly off-stage and Mawdryn may be an antagonist but is hardly a villain. Its interest is in setting up mysteries and conundrums and then tying the solutions together. In this it is mostly successful in spite of the fact it is juggling the introduction of not only a new companion but an experimental one; the return of the Black Guardian; and an appearance of the Brigadier in a role intended for Ian Chesterton. Where it fails is in missing conversations: Turlough is quite clearly not a schoolboy from the 20th Century UK and its pretty clear the Doctor is aware of the fact, but its not clear if this has actually been discussed with Turlough or not and this leads to a strange ambiguity in their interactions that is mostly unsatisfying. Similarly a good chunk of the plot revolves around Nyssa and Tegan's assumption that Mawdryn's injured form is actually the Doctor and while this is plausible (they find Mawdryn where they were expecting the Doctor to be) it still seems a bit of a stretch.

The Black Guardian is clearly making stuff up as he goes along, claiming everything is going according to plan every time Turlough abjectly fails to kill the Doctor. I mean, possibly it is all his plan, but it seems more likely that he's just bluffing, but actually in this case it kind of works. It makes the Black Guardian seem rather petty but then, as Tame Layman observed, the idea that the Black Guardian would be remotely interested in the Doctor basically means he's rather petty (at least in the grand cosmic sweep of anthropomorphic personifications of universe spanning abstract concepts).

There's some nice work going on in the sets too. My teenage self was unaware of the conspicuous luxury of Mawdryn's spaceship but it was obvious on viewing despite also obviously being a set built on a BBC budget of tuppence. Less immediately obvious is the contrast between the 1977 Brigadier's pristine and neat cottage and the 1983 Brigadier's more lived in version - something that is highlighted in the novelisation but which I don't think I'd have spotted if I hadn't been primed to look for it.

Mawdryn Undead should be praised for taking a large number of disparate ideas and concepts and tying them together into a pretty satisfying and coherent story. The lack of a clear and present villain, however, makes it seem a little sedate however, and the while it does manage to pull everything together it can't quite manage to disguise the somewhat random and disparate nature of its core concepts. An interesting place to end the randomiser.

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Of course, the question is what next? We're currently watching The Macra Terror which has been animated since we watched it on the randomiser. I've also recalled that we never watched The Faceless Ones for reasons that were not entirely clear to me, so I may watch that while B. is away. And of course there are all the Doctor Who stories that we didn't watch as part of the randomiser and which therefore were excluded on the basis of the "nothing watched in the last five years" rule (this is mostly, therefore, our favourite stories). After that B. has expressed an interest in rewatching NuWho from the start. I've already blogged about most of those stories twice so I'm not sure I'll have much to say on a third rewatch, but maybe I can think of a some kind of format that will shake it up a little. We shall see.

I watched The Time Warrior not so long ago when sir_guinglain of this parish, was guest speaker at an Oxford WhoSoc showing in honour of his book on the subject. Which said book is, by coincidence, now next on my "to read" pile.

Third Doctor stories generally have a certain solidity of construction and production value which makes most of them still pretty watchable in 2019. The Time Warrior is no exception. It felt more modest to me than many Pertwee stories, though it is hard to pin-point precisely why - perhaps the focus on history rather than military shenanigans, and an antagonist who has no particular interest in invading Earth - but I also feel it benefits from that modesty with an emphasis on characters and interactions rather than pyrotechnics (though the Doctor does get the opportunity for a fair amount of swash and buckle, nevertheless).

It is Sarah's first story and she is introduced in full-on straw-feminist mode initially. However once the writers have got over the need to establish that she won't make tea (and hence is indisputably a feminist), she is served well by the plot, acting independently and forming her own plans. The funny thing is that Jo would have been just as believable in this role and it surprises me that the production team seem so unaware of Jo's strengths as a character (just as it suprises me that they felt Liz Shaw "didn't work").

I'm in two minds about the use of Shakespearean turns of phrase in the historical parts of the story. It definitely contributes to a feel of a story set in the past, but it is also verges perilously close to cod medieval at times.

The characterisation is one of the stronger parts of the story. Although most of the characters are drawn in broad strokes (not unusual for Doctor Who), the story sets them up well-enough that their interactions are believable - particularly those between Sontaran Lynx, Robber-Baron-wannable Irongron and his henchman Bloodaxe. However, our favourite character was the short-sighted Professor Rubeish pottering endlessly curious and almost entirely undaunted around Irongron's dungeon and stepping up to help when required. The Time Warrior isn't a comedy but it is laced with humour which serves it well.

It is perhaps easy to overlook The Time Warrior amidst the UNIT stories of invasion and peril, but its smaller scale and fun characters make it well worth watching.

The Day of the Daleks is one of the few classic who stories to actually attempt to do something with time travel, beyond using it as a device to get the Tardis crew to the start of the adventure.

( I'm going to allude to spoilers, so be warned. )

I feel vaguely that I like this story better than it deserves. It is decidedly slow in places with a lot of sitting around waiting for things to happen. Neither the Doctor, nor Jo, really get to shine though there are some nice moments. But it's a story that has a classic SF feel. It utilises the Daleks well as background villains who are reacting to events rather than pursuing some devilish plan and has a pretty decent set of supporting characters who avoid overly simplistic categorisation into good and bad. It's trying to do something a bit different while still being distinctively Doctor Who.

I had been vaguely scorning the new shiny all-singing all-dancing Blu-Ray box sets of classic Doctor Who seasons as an unnecessary expense until a chance remark on Radio Free Skaro drew to my attention the all import less shelf space required aspect of the whole endeavour. By this point I had missed the opportunity to get Season 12, but I now have the season 18 and season 19 box sets and have donated the now redundant DVDs to charity.

All this is preamble to the fact that when State of Decay popped out of the Randomiser it was an opportunity to open up the season 18 box set and discover that we did not, apparently, have a functioning Blu-ray player. However Tame Layman was quite excited by the prospect of digitally remastered Tom Baker and so half an hour and much downloading of software later we watched it. It must be said I didn't really observe a noticeable difference over non-remastered Tom Baker, but Tame Layman was very impressed by the whole thing and he cares a lot more about the HD viewing experience than I so I am assuming that they are, indeed, vastly superior.

I was oddly disappointed by the story though. Despite being late Tom Baker, it is obviously harking back to the Hinchcliffe gothic horror days with its story of a medieval society and its vampiric overlords. More than that, it belongs to a category of Doctor Who story, also typical of a lot of Tom Baker where there is a slow reveal of an SF backstory, and these usually strike me as quite imaginative and clever where somehow in State of Decay it either seems rather obvious (that the three who rule are the original crew of the Hydra) or overly complex (all the stuff about Time Lord wars and Emergency orders), I think it doesn't help that the latter is delivered primarily through info dumps.

That said there is a confidence in the performances of the regular cast, perhaps because of the familiarity of the story style perhaps because of the romance between Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, that makes their interaction very engaging. Adric, in his second story, is considerably less irritating that he can sometimes be, despite already displaying his tendency to get fooled by the bad guys. As ever, the BBC costume department is clearly much happier dressing everyone in vaguely historic costumes than in trying to think up something futuristic making this (with Keeper of Traken) one of the better looking stories of the season. The lighting and sets manage to be broodingly atmospheric. In short, in a show that had been struggling with a shrinking budget and the resulting drop in production quality, State of Decay, feels like a return not only to the story style, but to the production quality of previous years.

What this leaves is a story that is undeniably better acted, better directed and better looking than much that surrounds it, but in looking back towards former glory seems to have more of the form of those stories than their heart.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth was much better than I had expected though I'm not quite sure why it was I expecting it to be a disappointment. It's one of those stories that feels like it was heavily influenced by people's experiences in World War 2. The scenes set in ruined London, with the resistance holed up in the tunnels listening to Dalek propaganda on the Radio have a sense of grounded reality to them that Doctor Who (particularly the Doctor Who of the sixties) rarely attains. In general, as well, the whole story looks like money has been spent on it (which I assume, as the much anticipated return of the Daleks, it had), with a large cast, loads of extras, and several action sequences which all helps.

It's also a pretty fast moving story (for the time, obv). I'd somehow thought it was longer than 6 episodes which may have helped my relief that events kept moving. Even when it slows down - a lot of the journey from London to Bedfordshire - it keeps the viewers interest with some excellent character moments, particularly the Doctor's group as it adapts itself around the growing romance between David and Susan (not too in your face, but much better handled and foreshadowed than many companion romances). That said, Susan still gets pretty short shrift, once again in a role that seems to mostly involve panicking and spraining her ankle. Vicki is so much better than this that one does wonder if the production team felt that some mistakes had been made with the character.

I was more moved than I had expected to be by the Doctor's decision to leave Susan behind, particularly the moments before he enters the Tardis as he stands their clutching her broken shoe.

Of course this was later remade as the Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 movie starring Bernard Cribbins. It was odd to see some scenes replayed almost exactly - and the resemblance between the two Dortmuns was uncanny. I wasn't sorry to use to lose the comedy sequences in the Dalek flying saucer, however. While the movie has a glossy technicolour exuberance, I think I may have liked this more measured and sombre version better.

I introduced The Mysterious Planet to Tame Layman in somewhat disparaging terms. Perhaps as a result of this he spent much of the first episode pointing out its good points to me, but by the third episode the discussion had turned to "what went wrong". Because The Mysterious Planet really ought to be much better than it is.

Its problems have sometimes been blamed on the fact that Robert Holmes was ill when he wrote it and died only a few months later. But actually there are flashes of Holmes on good form here - particularly the "double act" of Dibber and Glitz who are entertaining but with enough of an edge that you don't forget they are actually rather unpleasant criminals. The warrior queen Katryka also has a lot of good dialogue and certainly one of the things that went wrong seems to be that Joan Simms is completely bemused by the part rather than relishing in it. The set up is interesting, the world-building has a lot of nice touches, I'm not at all certain that the script is the core of the problem here.

Well, I will qualify that, I don't think the script in terms of events on Ravolox is the problem. I think almost everything to do with the Doctor's trial is dire. It breaks up the action to deliver nothing of real consequence. It makes the Doctor look stupid. It makes the Valeyard look little better. And it makes no sense. Tame layman kept asking why the Valeyard was presenting this as evidence against the Doctor since, contrary to the Valeyard's claims, the events mostly unfolded because Dibber and Glitz were present, not because the Doctor was present. Obviously something like 10 episodes later it is revealed that the whole trial is in part a front to cover up the Doctor's discoveries on Ravolox but even that doesn't make much sense - why present as evidence the events you are trying to cover up?

It also suffers from many of the 1980s problems of over-lighting, variable effects (some great, some good, some poor), and poor performances from some of the supporting cast. But other stories manage to rise above such things. In the end I think its biggest problems are the, in retrospect, poor decision to use a trial framing device for the whole season and one of the few occasions where John Nathan-Turner's desire to cast high profile guest actors back-fired.

Tom Baker's debut story, Robot is an odd story in many ways. It is a little "neither fish nor fowl" in that written, as it is, by departing Script Editor, Terrance Dicks it is looking back to the Pertwee Era and its UNIT stories but the hallmarks of Tom Baker's run are already there to see.

From the UNIT perspective, the Brigadier and Sergeant (now Warrant Officer) Benton are in place, together with new boy Harry Sullivan. We have a plot that is driven, in part, by Sarah's journalistic investigations. Our bad guys are also a group of mad scientists, reminiscent of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Tame Layman and I recently watched an early Avengers episode in which a similar group of mad scientists in vaguely Nazi uniforms were attempting to take over the world and it seems a bit zeigesty. While modern science fiction continues to draw both on evil mad scientists and on vaguely fascist organisations, it doesn't seem as interested in the idea of a group of fascist scientists intent on taking over the world and ruling in the name of rationality as the 1960s and 1970s were. That said there are oddities in this bunch of rationalists, typified by the functionary who criticises Sarah for wearing trousers despite the fact the whole organisation is basically run by the formidable Hilda Winters (admittedly in a skirt) who seems, like Liz Shaw, to be a Miss rather than a Dr. or Professor.

On the other hand we already have a story that is mining horror tropes. The first three episodes are riffing on Frankenstein's monster, though in a way that is rather more subtle than was to become common in later Hinchcliffe stories. The final episode feels a little tacked on the end. The fascist scientists are despatched with fairly quickly before the halfway point, leaving us with a sudden change of direction into a King Kong homage to finish the story.

The eponymous robot is of mixed success. It is nicely written as a genuine character, up until it goes mad in the final episode where it becomes fairly generic. Similarly it has a costume which is, I would say, a success from the elbows upwards and a failure from the elbows down.

Hindsight is a tricky thing. As a modern viewer I know that UNIT is on its way out, to gradually vanish from stories not with a bang but with a whimper. In that light, this looks like the beginning of the end, already impatient to get on and be a new sort of Doctor Who, helmed by Hinchcliffe and Holmes and starring Tom Baker. It's a good enough story but feels like one which, in some sense, the production team have already moved on from.

From The Web Planet to The Web of Fear: two stories which have remarkably little in common beyond the word "Web" in the title.

One thing the do have in common though (as well as the word "Web" in the title) is having been novelised early and well. To be honest, the novelisation of The Web of Fear is one of Terrance Dicks' 120 page jobs, but it is gripping and terrifying (at least if you are 9 years old). When, in 2013, all but one of the episodes of The Web of Fear were found, along with all of The Enemy of the World, it (of the two) was most anticipated and there was something of an air of disappointment once it was actually available. The memory, people felt, had in this case cheated.

For my birthday in 2013 I had a party on the 23rd November. The original plan had been to watch about three Doctor Who stories including the anniversary special, but when The Web of Fear was found I extended it earlier in order to watch this as well. To be honest, like many people, I think I was a little underwhelmed.

This time was very different. Oddly, tame layman recalled nothing of the earlier viewing (maybe he was in the kitchen making supper?) and he was genuinely gripped in the early episodes, and genuinely surprised and pleased when the Brigadier put in an appearance. Frankly the first two episodes are as gripping as my memories of the book suggest. It is difficult to tell with the third episode which consists only of telesnaps. The fourth is basically padding. There is a lot of running around shooting at yeti and a lot of the characters the story has been successfully building up are rather summarily bumped off, leaving a much smaller core group to carry the final two episodes. I suspect it is this fourth episode that is at the heart of the diappointment. It is ambitious for the 1960s but I suspect the collective imagination had built up the running fights through the streets of London into something impossible to realise at the time.

This feels eerily like a UNIT episode. I'm not sure if the producers already had UNIT in mind when creating it, but it has that feel of The Invasion and some of the early Pertwee stories, where the military have a much larger and more obvious presence. On the whole I think the story benefits from this. There is more excitement and more of a feel of realism (give or take Yeti in the London Underground, obviously) than in many Doctor Who stories.

The character work is often excellent. Anne Travers is a stand out - not only one of the show's first female scientists (a character type it was to lean into heavily for the next five years or so) but one of the better examples of the genre - able to stand up for herself, level headed, and equipped to help the Doctor. However the Brigadier, the unfortunate "Staff" (Sergeant Arnold in the novel but referred to by everyone as "Staff" here), Evans the cowardly but clever (professionally Welsh) Private, even Blake and Weams (two largely red-shirt characters) have a distinctiveness and life to them that mean you don't get the various soldiers confused with each other.

Rewatching this felt a bit like rediscovering the story. I'm not sure what went wrong in 2013. Maybe watching it all in one go was a mistake. But this took me back strongly to reading The Web of Fear at age 9 and experiencing the thrill of the Yeti in the London Underground.

The Mind Robber occupies a story-telling space with The Celestial Toymaker that is somewhat unique in Doctor Who. While there have been many "oddball" episodes since, there is something about these two stories with their overt invocation of other fictional characters/children's games as real within the story that makes them seem far more like each other than like anything else in Doctor Who canon. The Celestial Toymaker is frankly rather dull (although I reserve the right to change my opinion should the missing episodes ever be found), The Mind Robber on the other hand is quite highly regarded in Who fandom.

I'm sure I've seen The Mind Robber before and I've certainly read the novelisation but not a great deal of it rang any bells on this rewatch. The things I'd particularly recalled - that Gulliver uses only dialogue from Swift, that the trees in the forest are made out of words - didn't somehow seem as clever in situ as they were in my memory, though like all clever details the effect is undeniably reduced when you encounter it a second time.

The story was beset by production problems. Most notably the first episode had to be invented from whole cloth with no sets very late in the day. The result, while undeniably impressive under the circumstances, doesn't actually make a lot of sense and in retrospect feels very much like the filler that it is. Then Frazer Hines came down with chickenpox and had to be replaced for an episode (something that would have been difficult in most other stories but works in this context where the Doctor is set the task of assembling Jamie's face and gets it wrong).

All in all you've got a clever and inventive script with yet further inventiveness being used to offset the last minute problems. It is easy to see why fandom likes this.

On the other hand I felt it failed to really come to life. I'm not sure if this was over-high expectations or the very theatrical nature of a lot of the sets or just one of those things where some days, some stories don't particularly do it for you.

After all it has a truly impressive animated medusa, Zoe (rather improbably) demonstrating her martial arts skills, and the companions getting trapped in a giant book - really what more could you want from a Doctor Who story?